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Carolyn Dinshaw's Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Duke University Press, 1999), is dedicated at least in part to the productive scholarly (as opposed to pedagogical?) use of such juxtapositions. It predates the pop-Tolkien revival, though. Kasey Evans UC Berkeley On Tuesday, February 17, 2004, at 05:21 PM, Marianne F Micros wrote: I can add to this something that might scare you all (or at least amuse you). When my students were having difficulty with "The Faerie Queene," I told them that it was something like the soap opera "Passions." Similar themes and types of characters abound -- a false and evil version of a female who is being kept captive; a witch who has a magic mirror or pot of soup or something that she can see into; -- I found more and more of these similarities (well, not exactly similar). The scariest part is that I started watching "Passions" with my daughters and now watch it at the gym -- it makes the time go by when one is pumping away or cycling or whatever. Well, this comparison really helped the students. They caught on quickly! Obviously, they all know "Passions." Perhaps I can excuse myself for watching the soap opera by saying that it is scholarly research. On Tue, 17 Feb 2004, Beth Quitslund wrote: So today I received a pamphlet inviting me to become a Charter Member Subscriber of *Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review*, which is dedicated to "the growing body of critical commentary and scholarship about Tolkien's marvellous writing and his academic work." It's the last adjective that worries me. Do the editors and PR people mean "fabulous" or "fabular"? Studying Tolkien's writing for its own sake--for the kinds of reasons that many of us study Spenser, historicist, theoretical, and cultural studies apparatus notwithstanding--seems little different to me from studying *Star Wars* for its verbal genius. On the other hand, studying Tolkien's writing the way that critics of 20th-c. literature used to study Madonna might yield something. The CFP that Peter posted leaves open what I do think are interesting questions about the uses and attractions of faux medievalism (is "medievalism" always already "faux"?) in our own culture. How our students perceive the "medieval," not to mention the epic, affects the teaching of Spenser (a writer, we should remember, whose anachronisms some contemporaries thought as funny as I think the dialogue of Tolkien's more conspicuously noble characters). As a case in point: I once assigned a close reading of FQ I.vii.31, Arthur's headgear, to an undergraduate class. One student, at his wit's end to make sense of the "good" dragon there, adduced the rules of Dungeons & Dragons, where, his paper informed me, gold dragons are good and lesser-colored dragons are evil. Given the connotations of "brazen" describing the Old Dragon of Book I, there's the germ of an analogy there. But the underlying principle seemed to be that both the game and the poem described elves, enchanters, dragons, and people wandering around carrying weapons of various special potencies, and that therefore the rules must be similar. And although Tolkien was, in light of his academic work, more informed about the real Middle Ages, I think that in the next few years we will still see interesting effects on our classes from the movies and the revived interest in the books--effects that may change the students' perceptions or at least preconceptions of the FQ (are the inhabitants of Faerie Land immortal? Is Archimago a version of Saruman? etc.). On the other hand, Peter Jackson's movies may replace *Monty Python and the Holy Grail* as the film most likely to be cited in my medieval survey. Wouldn't that be a relief! Beth Quitslund At 11:44 PM 2/15/2004 +0000, you wrote: Peter et al. --- I'm not about to respond to this CFP. Not that there's anything wrong with its appearance on this List, but it puts me in mind of the line from C. S. Lewis, that he never met a man who _used_ to like Spenser. Back in the day, I was enthralled with the 'Rings' books, even to the point of using 'The Fellowship' in some of my teaching. And I watched each of the 3 movies with pleasure -- feeling at the end, however, that the last one went on much too long. Now I find that I've come around to something like the attitude that Edmund Wilson brought to the books when they were first published: 'bored of the Rings' and 'Ooh, those awful orcs!' Would it be possible to theorize distaste, disgust, impatience, either with Tolkien's reactionary imagination or with the enormous industry on display in those blockbuster movies? Is there anyone else out there who _used_ to like Tolkien -- and still likes Spenser (and also Ursula Le Guin, 'Riddley Walker,' and various other alternatives to realistic fiction)? Cheers, Jon Quitslund My friend, Laurie Johnson, asked me to submit this call for papers to this list. Peter C. Herman CALL FOR PAPERS: Theorizing J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings I seek proposals for a special session at the 2004 MLA in Philadelphia that would attempt to interpret Tolkien's Lord of the Rings in the light of contemporary critical concerns (New Historicism, feminism, deconstruction, cultural studies, etc.). Despite the fact that Tolkien's trilogy constitutes one of the most popular books of the latter twentieth-century, for many, the Lord of the Rings remains marginal to academic concerns. No article on this text, for example, has appeared in such journals as ELH, Review of English Studies, or PMLA. However, the popularity of Peter Jackson's films has created a resurgence of interest in Tolkien's work invites us to reread Tolkien's works in accordance with contemporary concerns. 250-word abstracts and a 1 page vitae by March 1. Send to Laurie Johnson Georgia State University Department of English MSC 8R0322 33 Gilmer Street SE, Unit 8 Atlanta, GA 30303-3088 Or as a MS word attachment to [log in to unmask] NOTE: All program participants must be members of MLA by April 7, 2004. The MLA membership requirement may be waived for participants who reside outside the United States and Canada ============================================== Beth Quitslund Assistant Professor of English Department of English Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 phone: (740) 593-2829 FAX: (740) 593-2818